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| ▲ | animal531 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's probably the same, for example in Afrikaans its just gif. Vergif is the verb action of doing it, and vergiftig the same past tense of it having happened previously. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Funny that in English gift is a word but entirely different meaning. In English it maintains its original Germanic meaning derived from the verb give. The sense of "poison" in German comes from a euphemistic use of "gift". (Literally 'something given' but actually used to calque Greek "dosis", which also literally meant 'something given', but was used to mean 'dose [of medicine]'.) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gift#Etymology Summing up, the reason gift is a word in English with an entirely different meaning from what it has in German is that everyone in Germany forgot what gift meant. (The reason it's gift and not something more like yift is the Danelaw.) |
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| ▲ | tharkun__ 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is one of the reasons I like HN: Random knowledge transfer like this. Appreciated! Also: in German Dosis is the word for dose. Die Dosis macht das Gift
(the dose makes the poison) |
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| ▲ | stevekemp 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > all so related but everyone does not want to admit it. I'm laughing in Finnish.. |
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| ▲ | tharkun__ 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hehe, you found the exception that proves the rule :P | | |
| ▲ | SllX 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | And Basque, Maltese, Turkish and Georgian. Magyar (Hungarian) and Finnish are both Uralic languages along with Estonian and the Sámi languages, but none of these are related to the Indo-European languages common in the other parts of Europe. And while most of Europe’s extant languages are in the Indo-European language family, there’s still a fair number of differences between Albanian, Germanic, Hellenic, Celtic, Romantic and Slavic languages. | | |
| ▲ | tharkun__ 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh for sure there are many differences, that comes with them being different languages, countries, ethnicity. You can do this on many levels. The point was essentially what you're showing here: People focusing on all the differences instead of shared history, languages influencing each other and how we're all not that different in the end. If you want to, even within what are nowadays countries and what outsiders would say is "one language" and "one ethnicity", you can start focusing on differences and make people dislike each other. |
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| ▲ | birdsongs 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| In Norwegian, "gift" is poison. It's also the word for married (de er gift). |
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| ▲ | pantalaimon 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | In German "Mitgift" is what the bride gets from her family when she enters marriage. |
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